Samaritan

by Richard Price

  “OK,” Nelson murmured, fighting down a grin.

  “Then you’re even dopier than I thought.”

  A shaft of sunlight came through the bedroom window, whiting out the furniture and flashing off the plastic sheets like cold fire. Nelson’s arms were entangled between his legs up to the biceps, blue veins bulging in the inverted crooks of his elbows.

  “Enough with the prelims,” Ray said, rising to his feet and lightly whacking the kid on the side of his leg. “It’s showtime, baby.”

  Nelson was using Ruby’s glove, a lefty, so at first Ray thought the reason his tosses were more like shot-put heaves than throws, his attempts at catching so ineffectual and spastic, was that the kid was all inside out, but after he switched gloves, giving Nelson a righty’s mitt, his hand-eye coordination became even worse, and Ray was surprised to find himself in the company of a twelve-year-old boy who had no idea how to catch or throw a ball.

  They were standing on the dead wheat-colored grass beneath his terrace, the Hudson River slapping its banks fifty feet away.

  The air smelled of sea funk and overturned earth; the only thing Ray loved about living in Little Venice, the raw and heady scent made him think of new beginnings, of second and third chances to get things right.

  Tossing around a softball had always been a lifesaver for him, a mode of nonverbal communication between himself and his daughter that they both had come to count on in times of awkwardness, and so he felt a little like a philanderer bringing this boy out here. But Nelson made his own laconic kid come off like a babbling brook, and he had no other idea of how to connect.

  “Get over here,” Ray said briskly, the kid stepping forward. “Give me the ball.

  “OK . . . Hang on, hold on . . .” Ray faltered in his demonstration; throwing a ball so second nature to him that he had to go through the motions himself just to see how it was done. “Hold on . . . OK. You’re a righty or a lefty?”

  “Right.”

  “Good. OK. Good.”

  Ray planted his feet, discovered that you had to stand slightly sideways, the foot opposite the throwing hand a little forward. “Do this.”

  Nelson took up the stance, then cut a glance at his mother up on the terrace, but Danielle was nose-down in her homework. Ray looked up there, too, then found himself fighting off a wave of frustration; she could at least fake an interest . . .

  “OK, let’s . . . OK,” planting the ball in Nelson’s right hand. “Put your hand behind your ear, the ball behind your ear.”

  Nelson held it there like a transistor radio.

  “No . . . OK. Cock your . . . Bend your elbow. Get it up, elbow up, ball behind your ear, OK?”

  Ray stutter-skipped backward about fifty feet, gave Nelson a target.

  “OK . . . When I say? I want you to snap it. Snap your wrist and just whip that bad boy to me, OK? Like this . . .” miming the act, Nelson watching him with his arm frozen into the position Ray had sculpted for him. “OK? Ready? Go ahead. Take my head off. Go.”

  Once again Nelson let loose with more of a heave than a throw, but less of a heave than before.

  Ray tossed back the ball. “Again.”

  And they worked that snap-and-release for the better part of an hour, Nelson steadily improving, not ready for the majors but less of a potential embarrassment to himself in a schoolyard.

  And over the course of that time, each of them periodically looked to the terrace with the same desire for Danielle’s attention, the physical ache in Ray diminished by what he had going on with her son right now, Ray telling himself that if he couldn’t command her passion, he’d settle for her admiration.

  “Nelson, you want to hear a sad story?”

  Ray tucked the glove under his arm, took a seat on the ghost grass, inviting the kid to do the same.

  “Seventh grade, right? My class, the boys were in an intramural softball league, each homeroom had its own team. And I had a glove,” he splayed his fingers, “it looked like an elephant fell off a skyscraper and landed on it, right? But the night before the first game? My grandmother, of all people, takes me to a sporting goods store and spends thirty bucks on a new one. And thirty bucks was some serious cheddar back then.

  “But this new glove, Nelson, it was state-of-the-art. I’m talking a dead man could catch with that thing. You with me so far?”

  Nelson bobbed his head, swallowed.

  “OK . . . The next morning, I’m so excited, I get on the train to go to school, go the two stops with a million other kids, get off on the platform, train pulls out and . . . I left the goddamn glove on the train.”

  Nelson just sat there, studying his sneaker.

  “I wanted to die. I never left anything on a train before. I wasn’t that type of kid. Plus, I spent the whole ride showing it off to my friends and—I assume twelve-year-old boys are still like this—these guys? Nothing made them happier than one of us having some kind of disaster. So when I started freaking on the platform they were howling like hyenas. Just loved it.

  “Are the boys in your class still like that? Someone rips their new jacket, everybody starts high-fiving each other?”

  Nelson shrugged.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Anyways, the game was after school, indoors in the gym. And I was the first baseman, that was always my position. And I had to borrow a glove from the other team. I get one just like my old glove, looked more like leprosy than leather. Anyways, we’re playing, and this glove sucks but I’m doing OK . . . So, ninth inning. We’re ahead four to three. The other team’s up, last licks. It’s two out, bases loaded. Kid hits a dribbler right to the pitcher. Now, our pitcher, Eric Abruzzi, was a very fat kid, but very, very cool. And Eric, as a rule, would never stoop for a ball, would never commit himself to any physical act that would make him look, ungainly, or foolish. But this was the ball game right here, right? So he goes down for it, tosses it underhand to me, the toss was so soft and perfect it could’ve been a newborn baby he was throwing. And, I got this kid out by a mile. But, as this grapefruit, this beachball, is coming to me, I say to myself, I’m gonna drop it. I, Raymond, Randolph Mitchell, will not catch this ball, and guess what . . .”

  “What,” Nelson finally said.

  “I dropped it. I fucking dropped it, two runs scored, and we lost, five four. How do you like them bananas . . .”

  The kid looked buzzed by Ray’s profanity, half smiling, half disoriented.

  “And after the game, going home? All I heard from my friends, my, my team mates, was ‘Fuck you, Mitchell, Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you.”

  Nelson developed frog’s eyes, fought back a smile, fought back anarchy like a balloon rising in his gullet, Ray leaning into him, whispering, “Fuck you, Nelson. Fuck you Fuck you Fuck you.”

  “Stop it!” Danielle barked from above, both Ray and Nelson raising their eyes to the terrace.

  “You have no say in this!” She was fighting with someone on the phone. “You have no . . . You have . . . You respect my wishes . . . No . . . No . . . It’s my life. It’s . . . Fine. I’ll come home and pack. I’ll come home right now and pack.”

  Ray assumed the fight was with Carla, the topic Freddy Martinez, himself, trouble.

  Nelson resumed scowling at his sneakers.

  “You did good today.” Ray forced some air into his tone. “We have to work on your catching, but you did good.” Then, “You ever do stuff like this with anyone else?” The question, he knew, was a sleazy one, his artful avoidance of any direct reference to Freddy making it feel sleazier still.

  Nelson didn’t respond.

  “Anybody ever teach you anything off the charts? You know, ventriloquism, carpentry, celestial navigation, midwifing . . .”

  “My dad once,” Nelson muttered, shrugged.

  “Your dad once what,” Ray pushed, unable to help himself.

  Nelson shrugged, looked away.

  “Talk to me, baby.”

  “He tried to teach me to box.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ra
y said lightly, it coming to him like the Annunciation: Just end it. “How’d that go?”

  “He got mad.”

  “What do you mean he got mad.”

  Another shrug.

  “How’d he get mad?”

  “He walked away.”

  They resumed their catch in the near-dark, Nelson having to chase after every ball tossed to him; flinching and turning his head each time as if Ray were flipping him a series of grenades.

  The game finally came to an end when he uncorked a moonshot over Ray’s head, the ball rolling down the lawn’s embankment, plopping into the river and bobbling away on the current.

  Nelson’s face turned gray with apprehension. Ray, pained to see fear rise up so quickly in a kid like that, briefly wondered where it came from, then quickly shut down that line of thought.

  “Hey, it’s just a ball, Nelson,” he said easily. “That’s why God gave us two.”

  Up in the apartment, Ray regarded Danielle with dispassionate eyes. “You were on the phone?”

  “Yeah,” she said, packing her book bag. “I’ll pay you for the call.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” her offer just one more turn-off. Nonetheless, he couldn’t help but ask, “Everything OK?”

  “My mother.” Danielle straightened up, arched her back. “She drives me nuts.”

  “What. About us?”

  “Among other things.” She resumed packing.

  “What other things.”

  “Don’t sweat it.”

  “OK,” Ray thinking, I won’t, seeing her for the last time now; Nelson, too.

  But then, at the door, with her son already halfway to the elevator, Danielle abruptly turned and almost violently threw her free arm around his neck, yanking him close and hissing in his ear. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Chapter 23

  White Tom—February 25

  This time around, the hospital smelled like terror; a pervasively astringent reek that set up house between Ray’s eyes and made the two-month-old Entertainment Weekly spread-eagled between his fists flutter as if caught in a gentle breeze, Ray reading and rereading the same paragraph about Ben Affleck and his new eighty-five-pound girlfriend as if his life depended on it.

  On this, his first visit back to the medical center since his release, he found himself molting in the waiting room of the outpatient physical therapy wing, surrounded by the palsied and the frozen, the stuporous and the forlorn, in-curled wrists, stroke-locked mouths, walkers, canes, wheelchairs, the only other sign of fluid life Nerese, his stick-like-glue escort these days, sitting next to him on the bench and speaking softly into her cell phone to some childhood friend of his that he had no memory of, neither face nor name.

  “He’s right here, right here. Here,” she semi-whispered both to Ray and to whoever was on the line, putting the phone in Ray’s hand.

  “Hello?”

  “It was a fucking mitzvah and a half, what you did for Carla, you cocksucker.”

  “Thanks, thank you,” Ray staring at Nerese, who nodded in encouragement, then commandeered his magazine.

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Do not fucking move.”

  Ray gave the phone back.

  “Tommy Potenza. White Tom. How can you not remember him?” she said.

  “Because, like I told you before, I never knew him.”

  “Well, he knows you.”

  “This is bullshit,” Ray hissed, rocking now, his stomach sprouting wings. “I have to sit here half a day to go in there for thirty minutes so they can watch me squeeze a rubber ball and do some leg lifts? No. I don’t think so.”

  “Did I tell you I spoke to Danielle Martinez last night?” Nerese asked, her eyes on the magazine.

  “Yeah, so,” Ray feeling one of his post-op head-stabs coming on; pawing himself for a Vicodin.

  “She didn’t even say to say hello,” Nerese said, then, “My God,” her voice going high and faint with astonishment. “Look how much weight Leonardo DiCaprio put on.”

  White Tom Potenza came striding into the waiting room twenty minutes later as fast as his cane-assisted gait would allow. He was roughly Ray’s age, wore a beret, shades, a charcoal turtleneck, black leather car coat, sunglasses and a broad black Pancho-style mustache.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he said to Nerese with mock menace, then took a seat next to Ray, embracing him at a right angle, Ray’s shoulder pressed into his chest, kissed him on the cheek and whispered, “You’re a good, good man.”

  Then, holding Ray by the biceps, he leaned across him to address Nerese.

  “You would not believe this dream I had. This fucking dream and a half . . .”

  His face was misted with perspiration and the grip he had on Ray’s arm was tremulous.

  Ray still had no idea who this was, but that “good, good man” lingered in his ear like a butterfly kiss.

  “I’m sitting in a movie with my son, he’s three years old, right?” White Tom’s voice a heightened whisper. “And next to him is this big fuckin’ shvug, no offense, with an Afro out to here and I see on the elbow rest he’s pushed my son’s arm off, like, pushed it, and my son’s a sweetheart, he never complains but this push was so fuckin’, fuckin’ rude, and violent that he made Maceo spill his soda. So I say, ‘Mace, change seats with Daddy,’ and so now I’m next to Afro-boy and I say to him, ‘You want to try that with me?’ And then I shove his fuckin’ arm right off the elbow rest.

  “And this big mamaluke, he pulls out this fuckin’ hand cannon, puts it right in my face, I say, ‘What are you gonna do, throw shots in here in front of a child? What kind of animal are you?’

  “And because, and only because it’s a dream, Neesy, the guy actually, mentally, absorbs what I’m saying and reholsters his piece.

  “I say to him, ‘Forgive me. I’m an overprotective parent. I was upset.’

  “So the guy goes back to watching the movie, I’m sitting between him and my son, staring at the screen but now that this guy’s relaxed, all’s I can think is how I can nail this nigger . . . Like this?” Bisecting Ray’s Adam’s apple with the flat of his hand, Ray feeling like an asshole.

  “Like this?” Resting a thumb against the corner of Ray’s eye.

  “I’m like murder on a stick. And then I wake up . . .” White Tom seized his head. “And I am so ashamed of myself. I’m still with the violence. My little boy’s right there and I can’t even . . . I’m still with the violence. I even used my son to set the guy up, soften him up.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake.” Nerese waved him off. “It was a dream, Tommy.”

  “It’s an ongoing issue, so fuck you,” he said without heat. “I don’t want to be that way. Ever. Like today, right?” He addressed Ray now. “Guy cuts me off on JFK. We pull up at the light? I didn’t even make eye contact. Now, that is a big first for me, but do you know why? Because I refuse to surrender to the darkness anymore. I mean what good can come of it. What possible good, can you feel me on this, you sonofabitch? Look at you, you still look like a kid.”

  “Oh yeah?” Ray, creaming to get away, tried to catch Nerese’s eye, but she seemed to be enjoying the show.

  “No, I remember you back then, chugging along . . .”

  “I never chugged anywhere in my life,” Ray said awkwardly, trying to get in the spirit of whatever this was.

  “Oh yeah? Well fuck you then.” Tommy kissed him on the cheek again, Ray at least distracted from the amorphous dread and interminable wait.

  White Tom pulled a square of brown paper towel, public restroom towel, from inside his car coat, then turned his head away as he removed his glasses and mopped his face, Ray thinking, speed, crank, coke, looking to Nerese for an explanation but she just smiled.

  “No, listen to me.” White Tom got back into it, the hand on Ray’s arm damp and shaky. “I have buried way too many friends. I have seen so many friends go down over the years I have fucking survivor’s guilt. Remember Hector Santos? Big Hector? Six-foot-five, built
like Man o’ War. Fucking Hector, could crush a raw potato in his fist, make basketballs explode with his bare hands. Hector, my soul brother, dead at thirty-two, a needle in his arm, sitting in a wooden chair, no other furniture in the room except a stack of books on the floor and a picture of his nephews hanging on the wall. His nephews, you hear what I’m saying? So fuck the darkness, OK? God has given me so many second chances in this life, but I know at some point, some point sooner than later, He’s gonna lose patience with me and then the sheets go up over the mirrors and my mother’s sitting barefoot on a wooden crate. So, no. I’m not marching in that parade no more.”

  “So Carla’s son. He OD’d, right?” Ray just saying it to say something.

  “Who, Reggie?” White Tom wiped his forehead again. “No, he was murdered.” He then leaned across Ray’s chest to go in Nerese’s face. “He. Was. Murdered.”

  Nerese just waved him off. “Coroner said OD.”

  “Bullshit. That kid’s been robbing Peter to pay Paul since he was in diapers. Somebody gave him a hot shot.”

  Nerese plugged a yawn with the back of her hand. “Coroner said OD.”

  “You know how you get that one off her ass? Put the doughnut at the far end of the table.”

  “Doughnut jokes,” Nerese muttered.

  “So what are you doing when you’re not playing guardian angel.” Tom’s eyes wagged like dog tails behind his shades.

  “Well, until a few weeks ago I was teaching,” Ray said stiffly.

  “Teaching where . . .”

  “Paulus Hook?” Then, just having to add it, “Pro bono.”

  “Pro Bono, who’s that, Sonny’s brother?” the guy too jumpy to smile at his own joke.

  “On the house. Volunteer.”

  “You were teaching for free?” He suddenly seemed to slow down, gather focus.